In chemical simulation and process engineering, there are various model based software application programs. These model based applications solve planning, scheduling and accounting problems by representing the business problem in a manner loosely related to the physical assets of a processing plant, for example a refinery or petrochemical unit. The applications use a Flowsheet representation to represent the flow of materials through the process units.
For example, Aspen Technology, Inc. of Burlington, Mass. provides model based applications by the names of PIMS, APS, HYSYS and AORA to name a few. These software applications use a Flowsheet representation to represent the flows of subject chemicals or material through process units such has catalytic crackers, evaporators, reactors and the like. However, the use of the Flowsheet is desperate with PIMS creating a Flowsheet after the fact (process planning) while APS and AORA use the Flowsheet to define the process/simulation problem. Also, the representation of the Flowsheet in each of these applications is different with each physical asset being represented by a different set of operations.
Thus the art has shortcomings in the Flowsheet representations resulting from the various process engineering software applications.